Functional Art: Weaving

The second part of our unit on Functional Art focused on weaving. Just like pottery, weaving is an art form that dates back to ancient times and is performed all over the world. Weaving yields many useful things that we use everyday, such as clothing, rugs and baskets. K1 students looked at some examples of different woven items and a variety of types of looms. Looms are the structures that are used to support weavings until they are completely assembled. In our case, however, the looms were a permanent part of the weavings.

K1 students began by drawing lines on the backs of two pieces of paper to act as guides for cutting. One of the papers was cut into separate strips, while on the strips on the other paper remained together by not cutting the last inch. This latter paper would become the loom.

We reviewed warm and cool colors, then used each color scheme to paint our papers using glittery water color paint, one warm and one cool. After our papers dried, we cut them and wove our papers together. We discussed how weaving is a pattern- over, under, over, under/ariba, abajo, ariba, abajo- and that each strip must be woven int he opposite pattern of the one before it. We observed how the result resembles a checker or chess board. Here are some of the K1 students' weaving samples. For more, visit https://sites.google.com/site/mrsrart/student-galleries.